Will KY universities have to sign loyalty oath to Trump to get research funding? | Opinion
In the same week we learned the University of Kentucky was among 45 universities found guilty by the Trump administration of helping students based on their race, another list of universities were told to sign a “compact” in order to continue to get federal funding.
UK has already cut ties with the Ph.D. Project, a nonprofit that mentors underrepresented minorities in business graduate studies, and will now look at any other groups it supports that need to be shut down. It’s not clear what that means, except that a lot of student support will disappear.
UK is already complying in advance in lots of other ways: No more funding to Pride or other organizations that support some students. It apparently also takes marching orders from accounts like Libs of TikTok, after it suspended an employee for a Facebook comment on Charlie Kirk’s death.
But Kentucky’s flagship is in a terrible situation, caught between the rock of the Trump administration and the hard place of a GOP supermajority in the General Assembly that largely supports Trump’s goals..
The new compact was sent to nine universities: University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Southern California, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.
It requires a more stringent loyalty oath to Trump’s agenda, including capping international student enrollment, creating strict definitions of gender, and changing governance structures to prohibit anything that punishes conservative ideas.
In return, federal research funding would not be cut off.
This compact is expected to be expanded to many more schools. Because UK has already been flagged by the Trump administration, I fear it will be on that list, too.
There are a lot of problems with all of this — ranging from the immorality of stopping support to those people historically shut out of higher education to First Amendment concerns. But there’s also the issue of turnabout and fair play.
Now Trump supporters may believe they will be in charge well beyond 2028.
So would we want a Democratic administration tying federal funding to whether liberal ideas are punished? Higher education has flourished under Republican and Democratic administrations, making it a model in the world, particularly when it comes to medical research. So we should shut that down research funding because a school has a P-Flag group on campus?
Generally speaking, Republicans want education to be controlled locally. Yet more control of academia has been a longtime goal of Trump, who perceive it to be a bastion of liberal indoctrination. So let’s say Trump gets all the Ivy Leagues, publics and privates under his complete financial and educational control. Then a Democrat gets elected.
Should that person control them too?
As none other than GOP Sen. Ted Cruz said recently about the Jimmy Kimmel suspension, “If the government gets in the business of saying, ‘We don’t like what you, the media, have said; we’re going to ban you from the air waves if you don’t say what we like’ — that will end up bad for conservatives.”
The same is true for education.
Steven Voss, a political science professor at UK, pointed out another potential disadvantage of the compact.
“Jerking around public policy based on who happens to be in power at the time creates a lot of waste and inefficiency,” he said. “Inconsistency in public policy is damaging in and of itself.”
For example, UK does groundbreaking work in Alzheimer’s Disease at the Sanders Brown Center on Aging, which gets millions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies.
Let’s say they lose all that because UK is judged insufficiently loyal to Trump. A breakthrough in a terrible, heartbreaking disease is lost, and it costs much more to start over from scratch.
That’s just one example.
Probably, schools won’t have a lot of choice but to sign the compact and then pray the Democrats win the U.S. House in 2026.
But let’s also remember that blackmail as public policy won’t stop with these demands. It will keep going until speech and curriculum seen as disloyal to Trump becomes the goalposts.
Trump University didn’t do so well the first time around, shut down amidst federal investigations. Trump paid students a $25 million settlement back in 2018. But this time, Trump has much bigger, better weapons at his command.
